219 Partners Trust jobs cut

More than half of Partners Trust Financial Group Inc.'s jobs in the Mohawk Valley will be gone by the end of the year as new owner M&T Bank Corp. takes over.

TORY N. PARRISH

About the cuts
* Partners Trust, a company whose history dates back 168 years, was formed out of a merger of the former Savings Bank of Utica and the former Herkimer County Trust. As of June 30, Partners Trust employed 771 employees in the Mohawk Valley, Syracuse and Southern Tier regions.

* The sales price for the bank, including 33 branches in Oneida, Herkimer, Broome, Chenango, Onondaga and Tioga counties, was $555 million.

* On Friday, M&T announced that a total of 382 jobs will be cut:

* Utica and New Hartford: 219 job cuts.

* Syracuse: 62 job cuts.

* Binghamton: 101 job cuts.
More than half of Partners Trust Financial Group Inc.'s jobs in the Mohawk Valley will be gone by the end of the year as new owner M&T Bank Corp. takes over.

In all, 219 bank jobs are disappearing in Utica and New Hartford because they're considered redundant, M&T officials said Friday. The job cuts affect back-office duties such as processing checks, staffing call centers and handling mortgage services.

Also, Partners Trust's Ellinwood Drive operations center in New Hartford will close in the first quarter of 2008.

The job cuts were expected yet still disappointing, said Little Falls resident Jenny Broat, 26, an operations associate who works on Internet banking at the New Hartford office. She is among the workers losing her job.

"It's heartbreaking," said Broat, a six-year employee who began her career at a Partners Trust predecessor, Herkimer County Trust. "There are people who've been here so long, who are close to retirement."

Tellers, customer service associates and other employees who work in local bank branches will not be affected by the job cuts, M&T said.

M&T's acquisition of Partners Trust, announced in July, is the result of a changing banking industry in which fewer banks exist independently, said Brian Hickey, executive vice president and upstate area executive for M&T.

"I think the fundamental message is that the banking industry is in an era of consolidation," Hickey said.

In 1997, there were 10,923 banks and savings associations in the United States, compared to 8,615 as of Friday, according to Andrew Gray, spokesman for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in Washington, D.C.

The loss of 219 jobs, some that pay quite well, is a blow to the Utica area's economy. Still, M&T is committed to contributing to the community, managing its banks like community banks and being a good corporate citizen, Hickey said.

"The community will find us to be very interested in what's important to Utica," he said.

Tallying the cuts

Letters were mailed to all Partners Trust employees Wednesday notifying them about the future of their jobs. In all, 56 percent of the bank's local workforce is being eliminated.

Of 117 employees who work at the 223 Genesee St., Utica, headquarters office, 80 back office employees will be laid off, M&T spokeswoman Jean Hill said. All but one of the 138 employees who work on Ellinwood Drive will be laid off, she said.

The local figures provided by M&T add up to 217 jobs, but the company said the total jobs lost will be 219. The discrepancy was not explained.

M&T said it is cutting the jobs because their duties are already performed in Buffalo, where M&T is headquartered.

In the Syracuse and Binghamton areas where some M&T and Partners Trust branches are near each other, there will be some bank branch consolidations, Hickey said. In those cases, job reductions will be made through attrition, not layoffs, he said.

Politicians react

It is ironic that a reception for local officials and community members to meet M&T's management team will be held Monday, Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente said.

"What am I going to do?" Picente said. "Go there and thank them for taking 219 jobs out of our community? It's awful."

Picente said he will work with the state's Department of Labor to find out if the displaced Partners Trust employees can be matched with similar back office or accounting jobs at organizations such as Bank of America or the federal Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Rome.

New Hartford Town Supervisor Earle C. Reed said he, too, had spoken to the labor department to see what could be done to help those who lost their jobs.

"It's a terrible blow to the individuals," Reed said. "And there is always a ripple effect."
Assemblyman David R. Townsend Jr., R-Sylvan Beach, spoke of a political dimension to the Partners Trust job losses, saying in a statement that Gov. Eliot Spitzer is ignoring Upstate New York's economic issues.

"Let's hope that the governor gets his priorities straight in the near future so our upstate economy is able to flourish like our neighbors downstate," Townsend said in a statement.